The Efficiency Trap
When Progress Demands More Than It Gives
We were promised more time.
When the iPhone launched, it sold itself as freedom in your pocket. Slack claimed to kill email. AI tools now promise to write our emails and summarize our meetings. Each tool whispers the same quiet promise: "This will make life easier."
And in a sense, they do. Messages arrive instantly. Scheduling is seamless. Workflows compress into tappable blocks and slash commands. But something odd happens after we save all that time: we don’t feel freer. We feel tethered.
The irony is hard to miss. Efficiency tools often become their own undoing—not because they fail, but because they work too well. They raise expectations. What once felt like convenience becomes obligation. What once counted as overachievement becomes table stakes.
This is the efficiency trap.
Slack was supposed to make work communication more fluid. And it did—sort of. But most knowledge workers will tell you it also created a new kind of anxiety. When your name gets mentioned in a channel at 9:47 p.m., the expectation isn’t just that you can respond—it’s that you should. The boundary between work and life hasn’t just blurred; it’s dissolved.
The iPhone did something similar. It made us reachable anywhere. But that meant we became reachable everywhere. No one schedules phone calls anymore because the default assumption is always-on availability.
These tools made things faster. But they didn’t shrink our workload. They expanded the container in which work happens. We now expect ourselves—and others—to be more productive, more responsive, and more available, all the time.
Economists have a name for this: the Jevons Paradox. In the 19th century, William Stanley Jevons observed that making coal-burning engines more efficient didn’t reduce coal consumption. It increased it. The more useful something becomes, the more we use it.
The same applies to communication. Faster tools don’t lead to fewer messages. They lead to more of them. Email didn’t replace the memo; it multiplied the size of the inbox. Slack didn’t kill email; it added another layer. And AI, promising to take on our "low-value" tasks, risks only creating space to assign more tasks.
The result? Our time savings get swallowed by rising expectations.
This is where we need older wisdom—voices that spoke of limits not as constraints to overcome, but as conditions for flourishing.
Wendell Berry, in his essays and fiction, reminds us that true efficiency isn’t about speed but about fit. Machines, he argued, should fit within the rhythm of a place and the limits of a people. Technology, when scaled without reference to the human, becomes disorienting.
The Sabbath is another powerful protest against the cult of optimization. It says: stop. Not because you're done, but because you're human. In You're Only Human, Kelly Kapic builds on this, arguing that limits are not sins to overcome but gifts to embrace. We were never meant to be infinite, always-on beings. The pressure to act like it is a distortion of who we are.
So why do we fall for this every time?
Partly, it's because efficiency offers the illusion of control. In a chaotic world, it feels empowering to tame your inbox or schedule. But it's also because our cultural scripts about work are broken. We valorize hustle. We equate busyness with importance. We treat slowness as weakness.
But the deeper problem might be epistemological: we confuse speed with clarity, quantity with value, and availability with commitment. We've internalized a metric-driven way of thinking about ourselves, where "enough" is always just out of reach.
What Resistance Looks Like
I don’t think the answer is going off-grid. I still use my iPhone. I still reply on Slack. But I’m learning that resistance doesn't have to be rejection. It can look like:
Turning off notifications by default.
Defining communication hours and holding that boundary.
Valuing slow thinking over instant reaction.
Making room for unoptimized time—for things that form us rather than "produce" something.
And maybe most importantly: telling a better story. One where time isn’t just a container to be filled, but a gift to be stewarded. One where being finite isn't a flaw, but part of being fully human.
The lie is that efficiency leads to freedom. But often, it just changes the shape of our captivity.
We don’t need more tools to save time. We need better stories about what time is for.